Dzieje innych miłości, czyli o nieprzekładalności bezwzględnej w tekstach o wartościach w sztuce

Author(s): Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1&2/2016

Autorka stawia pytanie o nieprzekładalność „absolutną”, czyli o to, co nie dociera do obcojęzycznego odbiorcy translacji. Na podstawie albumu o zabytkach kultury polskiej przechowywanych w Bibliotece Narodowej w Warszawie, w wersji angielskiej tłumaczonej z polskiego oryginału i mogącej służyć za wzór znakomitego przekładu, ukazuje, jak teksty odnoszące się do sztuki narodowej mogą zawierać takie pułapki dla tłumacza. Mimo doskonałego wykonania przekładu, u docelowego odbiorcy z innego kręgu kulturowego tłumaczenie nie wywołuje tych samych reakcji na specyficzne, inherentne wartości tekstu pierwotnego, doznawanych przez czytelników należących do społeczności kulturowej tekstu wyjściowego. // The author asks whether there is such a thing as “absolute” untranslatability. In other words, do situations occur in which the full translatability of a text is prevented no matter how good the translation and how skilful the translator? She examines the English translation of a volume on national heirlooms, items of Polish heritage preserved in the National Library in Warsaw. This translation may be regarded as a benchmark for quality, yet it turns out that recipients not belonging to the Polish cultural milieu will not be able to respond emotionally in the same way as natives to the cultural values inherent in the original text.

Towards a comprehensive theory of culturally constructed humour

Author(s): Sajjad Kianbakht / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

In the present research, we discuss Humour Studies within Linguistics, focusing mainly on linguistic theories of humour including the Semantic Script Theory of Humour (SSTH; Raskin 1985), and the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH; Attardo 1994, 2017b). The study demonstrates different types of cultural conceptualisations (Sharifian 2017a, 2017b) that the interlocutors draw upon, such as cultural categories, cultural metaphors, and cultural schemas to create humour, and we argue that the General Theory of Verbal Humour does not account for culturally-constructed verbal humour. Hence, we argue that it is necessary to fill this gap in the most prevailing theory of verbal humour, the General Theory of Verbal Humour, by demonstrating how cultural conceptualisations must be considered in identifying and analysing instantiations of humour, in moving towards a comprehensive theory of culturally constructed humour.

The visual representations of a Biblical proverb and its modifications in the Internet space

Author(s): Hrisztalina Hrisztova-Gotthardt,Melita Aleksa Varga,Anna T. Litovkina,Katalin Vargha / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Proverbs have never been considered sacrosanct; on the contrary, they have frequently been used as satirical, ironic or humorous comments on a given situation. In the last few decades, they have been perverted and parodied so extensively that their variations have been sometimes heard more often than their original forms. Naturally, the most well-known Biblical proverbs are very frequently transformed and modified in various languages. “He who digs a pit for others falls into it himself” is one of such widespread proverbs originating from the Bible. This proverb exists in almost fifty European languages, including Croatian, English, German, Hungarian and Russian. Below, we would like to demonstrate the occurrence and popularity of this proverb, as well as its transformations in the five languages. The major source for this study has been the Internet and some previously constructed Internet corpora. In the course of the present study we are going to focus primarily on the visual representation of the Biblical proverb in question and its (humorous) modifications as well on the interaction between text and image.

Comparing English and Russian humour perceptions through statistical signature analysis

Author(s): Faisal L. Kadri,Ekaterina N. Zakharenko / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Signature analysis is a statistical technique introduced in the 1940s in order to identify groups of statistical measures to identify aircraft from radar reflections. Other applications include particle identification in nuclear physics and dark matter location in astrophysics. Humour appreciation, or funniness scores, are empirical measures of perceived humour. Two questionnaires, one in English, the other its translation into Russian, were made available online. Each had 96 humorous sentences or jokes. The sentences were classified empirically according to four age trends. Signatures of the four classes of sentences are calculated from participant scores in six age groups. The original scores will be available to researchers for verification and further investigation from either author. The use of signature analysis in this work involves the comparison of a sentence profile with the signature of its class or category; if the profile meets a strict criterion of errors then it can be described as a best predictor of its class. One notable finding from signature analysis is the existence of offsets: displacement of a sentence profile from its type signature. We suggest that offset values are direct measures of humorousness without reference to context. In this analysis, the profiles of the Russian and English sentences are compared to each other and their graphical differences are interpreted including offsets.

Book review

Author(s): Aleksandar Takovski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Book review

Author(s): Sabrina Francesconi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Concept “humour” in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine

Author(s): Iuliia Kobzieva,Iia Gordiienko-Mytrofanova,Maryna Udovenko,Serhii Sauta / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The purpose of this study was to define and to describe the semantic components of the stimulus word humour in the linguistic consciousness of young Russian-speaking people from Eastern Ukraine. The main method of the research was a psycholinguistic experiment. The sample comprised 400 young people (aged 20-31), males and females being equally represented. The experiment proved that the concept humour in the linguistic consciousness of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine is represented by four core semantic clusters: “laughter,” “joke,” “merry-making/joy” and “show.” Analysis of female and male associative fields shows that the semantic core of the word humour does not depend on the respondents’ gender identification. The results of frequency and cluster analysis have implied a number of the following conclusions. Firstly, humour and laughter form an inseparable unity of stimulus and reaction in the linguistic consciousness of respondents, although the psychological paradigm considers humour and laughter as two independent phenomena. Secondly, the cognitive component of humour was only reflected in the peripheral cluster “mind” of respondents’ associations. Thirdly, young Russian-speaking people from Ukraine do not have an ideal image of humour represented by a certain comedy show or relevant to any specific comedians. The generalised visualisation of humour is represented by reactions of the extreme periphery. Finally, comparative analysis of the verbalised concept humour in the linguistic consciousness of Russian-speaking population of Ukraine and people who live in Russia did not reveal any national-specific features in the perception of stimulus humour.

Detachment of empathy:

Author(s): Ron Aharoni / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

This is a sequel to a previous paper (Aharoni 2018), in which I suggested that the game of humour is played not between two meanings of the same carrier, but between meaning and its carrier: the two are detached from each other by some means. In the present paper I want to substantiate this thesis by some evidence, the main one being referred to in the title of the paper. It is that two well-known theories of humour, both presently neglected to a large extent, are based on this mechanism. In both the carrier of meaning is not words, but actions. In fact, one of the main messages of the paper is that often the carrier of meaning in jokes, and in humour in general, are actions. I will try to show that both Bergson’s “automatic behaviour” theory and the superiority (or derision) theory are based on detachment of empathy, namely of identification. Since, as I will try to show, empathy and identification are man’s (and even animals’) main tool in deciphering meanings of actions, this results in detaching actions from their meanings.

Tulburarea de dezvoltare a coordonării – de la terminologie la diagnostic și intervenție. Implicații logopedice.

Author(s): Raluca Nicoleta Trifu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2020

Developmental coordination disorder DCD is a specific set of impairments corelated with gross and fine motor disfunction, poor motor planning and impaired sensor integration. The term is use wildly for this condition, based on the proposed term made by The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5), but others terms such as dyspraxia, specific motor dysfunction, specific coordination motor disfunction (ICD – 10) are used and preferred in the same time. The article displays the multiple terms used in the literature connected with the DCD, the criteria for diagnosis, the implication for education and target specific intervention in case of DCD

Translating irony into Arabic – who’s having the last laugh?

Author(s): Rashid Yahiaoui,Basema Alqumboz,Ashraf Fattah,Amer Al Adwan / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

Monsters Inc., an animated feature film produced by Pixar Animation Studios in 2001, received significant recognition worldwide. The film was nominated in 2002 for the ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards by the Box Office Films. Two dubbed versions of the film were later released with Arabic translations using Egyptian Vernacular, a spoken dialect, and Modern Standard Arabic, used primarily in formal, written communications. This study examines humor in translation and irony as humor which represents a common technique in “Pixar plotting”. The research investigates the strategies, types, and categories of irony as humor within the translations and the success of those translations at accurately transmitting the humorous meaning. Aimed towards exploring the problems of translating irony across languages and cultures, this research examines the shifts in translations between the two Arabic language versions, using an interdisciplinary theoretical approach encompassing humor studies, audiovisual translation studies, and descriptive translation studies. Furthermore, the research adopts Muecke’s (1978) classification of irony markers to categorize and identify the strategies used in translating irony as humor. The study finds that the two different versions of Arabic utilize similar strategies at certain times and divergent ones at others. They include explication, substitution, omission or addition, in translating irony as humor, with each strategy succeeding or failing at varied levels of meaning transmission. The research suggests that translators’ creativity, or lack thereof, and the language variant used are primarily responsible for the success or failure of transmitting irony as humor for dubbing into Arabic.

Conceptual integration theory and British humour:

Author(s): Joanna Jabłońska-Hood / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

Conceptual integration theory (henceforth CIT), also known as conceptual blending, was devised by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) as a model for meaning construction and interpretation. It is based on the notion of a mental space, which originated in Fauconnier's early research (1998). Mental spaces are structures that constitute information pertaining to a particular concept (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 40). Interestingly, mental spaces can be linked together and blended so as to produce a novel quality. In this manner, conceptual integration serves as a theoretical model that throws light on creativity in language use. In my paper, I will apply CIT to British humour in order to use its multiway blending together with its dynamic, online running of the blended contents for the purpose of comedy elucidation. It is crucial to observe that British humour is a complex phenomenon which pertains to many different levels of interpretation, i.e. a linguistic, cultural or discursive. CIT possesses a well-suited cognitive apparatus which can encompass the complexity of British humour with all its layers. The primary goal of the article is to analyse a selected scene from a sitcom entitled Miranda in order to show the validity of the theory in respect of humour studies. In particular, I will undertake to demonstrate that CIT, with a special emphasis on its principles such as compression and the emergent structure of the blend can deal with many processes that accumulate within British humour and result in laughter. Simultaneously, I will try to demonstrate that frame-shifting, as proposed by Coulson (2015: pp. 167-190), can be of help to CIT in explaining humour.

Metapragmatic stereotypes and humour:

Author(s): Vasia Tsami / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

The present study concentrates on the potential of mass culture texts to impose specific metapragmatic stereotypes (Agha 2007) through humour on the wider audience. Metapragmatic stereotypes constitute speakers’ internalized models of how language should or should not be used; such models guide speakers’ own language use and enable them to make evaluations about their own language behaviour or that of others. In this context, I explore the dominant metapragmatic stereotypes for the interpretation and perception of humorous mass culture texts. To this end, I analyse a humorous Greek TV advertisement of a telecommunications company. Drawing upon Coupland’s (2007) conceptualization of style and the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo 2001), I intend to show that humour reflects, sustains, and reproduces the dominant metapragmatic stereotypes of linguistic homogenisation and monolingualism (Blommaert & Rampton 2011). Then, I explore how the audience perceives the representation of stylistic choices in mass culture texts and, more specifically, in the analysed advertisement. My informants were 96 students of the last two grades of a Greek elementary school. The recipients’ responses show that their metapragmatic stereotypes are aligned with the dominant ones: they approach stylistic choices as strictly-defined systems used in specific social contexts and they expect the alignment of TV fictional characters with linguistic homogeneity. My findings suggest that humour stigmatises specific styles, and that the audience perceive the respective (and reinforced through humour) metapragmatic stereotypes as guidelines for “correct” stylistic use. Furthermore, it seems that through humour, such stereotypes usually go unnoticed in mass culture texts and may even become naturalised, as they are framed in a “trivial” and “non-serious” manner.

Book review

Author(s): Massih Zekavat / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

Travel back to school:

Author(s): Maja Turnšek,Tatjana Zupančič,Barbara Pavlakovič / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2019

From living museums to heritage escape rooms, edutainment is becoming a norm in heritage interpretation, yet not much is known of the specific role humour plays in the creation and performance of such educational products. This paper explores concepts of authenticity, functions of humour, and experience design dimensions in an in-depth case study of a tourism product. The product “Smart Head Primary School” is a re-enactment of teaching as it occurred in the 1950s in Slovenia. It became very popular primarily due to its extensive inclusion of humour. The product uses the role of a strict teacher to interpret to the “pupils” (visitors) the prime elements of the region’s heritage. To analyse the intertwining of humour with heritage interpretation, the authors combine two research methods: (a) a survey distributed to the visitors of the product, and (b) the in-depth analysis of a transcribed video-recording of a sample performance including the self-analysis and the reflections of one of the “teachers”. The results show that with the use of humour, visitors are able to perceive and recognize the difference between objective and constructive authenticity more effectively.

Book review

Author(s): Jocelyn Chey / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2019

Breaking frame and frame-shifting in Bassem Youssef’s satirical TV show al-Bernāmeg

Author(s): Mohamed Mifdal / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This paper reviews how humor is made in terms of three theoretical models. First, it draws onthe contribution of the structural semantics to the understanding of the text of the joke,especially the related notion of isotopy and the linear organization of the text of the joke.Second, this paper discusses humor in light of the Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH),and the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). Third, this paper draws also on twopragmatic and discursive approaches, namely Grice’s cooperative principle, and Simpson’smodel of satire as a discourse. This paper argues that semantic incongruities and theirresolutions, as well as the violations of the cooperation principle can be best apprehended inlight of the frames theory as developed in social sciences by Erving Goffman and frameshiftingtheory as it has been developed by Seana Coulson. The aim of this paper is to revealthe mechanism used to produce humor and laughter in one of the most popular satirical showsin the Arab world, Bassem Youssef’s al-Bernāmeg. The focus is not only on what humor/satiredoes (ridicule, mockery, attack of targets, overstepping of boundaries…), but also on how itdoes it (violation of codes, breaking frames, frame-shifting, conceptual blending) and whythese discursive strategies are used (implications in light of historical and cultural context).This paper also argues that the generation of humor can be based broadly on breaking frames,which is inclusive of incongruity (both verbal and contextual), but studied in a multimodalcontent where incongruity is based on breaking and shattering frames that are constructed inverbal and visual forms. Humor generation is conducted through a continuous chain-likeprocess of building, shattering, and rebuilding frames. It also deals with the frame-shiftingand conceptual blending mechanisms at the level of interpretation and the construction of themeaning of humor. The aim is to account for the creative and flexible use of language forsatiric purposes and thus to enhance the ability of traditional frame-based systems, includingscript-opposition theory to account for such flexibility in light of context and with reference tobackground.

Individual differences in the way observers perceive humour styles

Author(s): Robyn Brown,Bruce Findlay,Jay K. Brinker / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

Humour has been conceptualised as styles, which vary based on their function(Martin et al. 2003). Research examining if and how observers perceive this intent islimited. The current study addresses this research gap by examining the perceptionsof Martin et al.’s (2003) four humour styles. Additionally and of particular interestwas whether self-defeating humour and another self-disparaging humour style,namely self-deprecating humour, were perceived as two independent humour styles.Despite being similar in content, self-deprecating humour is associated with higherself-esteem and self-defeating humour with lower self-esteem. Two hundred and fourstudents watched comedy clips and completed a survey online. Participants wereasked to categorise each video clip by humour style and to rate the self-esteem of thetarget (i.e. producer). Results revealed that humour styles are distinguishable byobservers with participants’ predominantly selecting one humour style over the othersfor each clip. In support of the second hypothesis, targets who were categorised asusing self-deprecating humour were perceived as having higher self-esteem thanthose categorised as using self-defeating humour, illustrating a distinction in theperception of these humour styles at an interpersonal level.

Lost in Warsaw:

Author(s): Monika Woźniak / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

In 1964, many decades before multilingual movies have become fashionable, a Polish director,Stanisław Lenartowicz, made a war comedy called “Giuseppe in Warsaw.” It narrates theadventures of an Italian soldier who on his way home from the Russian front during World War IIis stranded in Poland. Pseudo-language, translation, mistranslation, and mock translation figureconspicuously in the movie, which shows a series of clashes between Polish, German and Italianlanguages in the most improbable combinations. The original film used no subtitles, because thelinguistic chaos was pivotal to showing the absurdity of the war through the deforming lenses of thecomedy. This paper analyses various mechanisms of the multilingual humour in the original filmand in its subtitled version in Italian, in order to see how the dynamics of humour change in thecase of L3TT which becomes L2 in translation (Italian), especially when the point of the view of theaudience is subverted and the viewers identify with the protagonist rather than the Polishcharacters in the movie.

Multilingual humour in a polyglot multicultural author:

Author(s): Cristina Vezzaro,Katrien Lievois / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This paper focuses primarily on the Dutch and Italian translations of Fouad Laroui’s works,in which the two central features of his writing, i.e. humour and multilingualism, are strictlyrelated. Laroui is a transcultural author fluent in French, English, Dutch, dialectal Arabicand classical Arabic, and his works reflect the different layers of experiences and languageshe has gathered during his life. Humour, on the other hand, is a way for him to present, in anaxiological opposition, different viewpoints that mostly cross cultures, nationalities andsocial hierarchies. Our analysis of Le Jour où Malika ne s’est pas mariée and Une annéechez les Français has allowed us to pinpoint the interaction between the two main features ofhis writing and examine the creation of puns by means of different languages or loanwords.We have then analysed the various strategies adopted by translators and commented theirdifferent solutions. Our analysis has allowed us to identify three different ways in which athird language (L3) in the source text – often connected to humour – is rendered in the targettext, i.e. (1) taken as it is, (2) distorted or adapted to the target language and (3) kept with anintertextual or paratextual element or replaced altogether.

Academic event report

Author(s): Kerry Mullan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019